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City Criticizes Judge in Case Of Hiring At Fire Dept.

The federal judge who ruled that the New York Fire Department discriminates against minority candidates and ordered a court-appointed monitor to oversee its recruiting efforts has “lost any semblance of neutrality” and should be removed from the case, the city said in an appeal filed this week.

“It is an understatement to say that this judge has expressed firm views on the city’s ostensible intent to discriminate,” city lawyers said of the judge, Nicholas G. Garaufis of Federal District Court in Brooklyn. “To any reasonable observer, the vehemence of those beliefs would raise substantial doubt that he could fairly reevaluate the evidence.”

In its appeal of the decision, filed on Tuesday, the city accused Judge Garaufis of having a “one-sided assessment of the evidence,” adding that “he took on the roles of witness and advocate.”

City lawyers also said that Judge Garaufis was preoccupied with the press coverage of the case, pointing to statements he made in court about comments the mayor and other city officials made to the news media.

“The mayor goes on the radio attacking the court,” Judge Garaufis said, according to the court filing. “And the corporation counsel’s representative attacks the court instead of just saying, ‘We simply disagree.’ ”

In October, after a bench trial, Judge Garaufis issued a lacerating decision that accused Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of willfully ignoring the racial imbalance in the Fire Department and ordered a court-appointed monitor. Judge Garaufis’s ruling called the department “a stubborn bastion of white male privilege.”

That ruling followed four years of litigation in which the city and the Fire Department were accused by the Justice Department and, later, the Vulcan Society, a fraternal organization of black firefighters, of allowing the department to remain almost 97 percent white for decades, despite the fact that the city’s population is about 25 percent black.

“They did a number of things, including the way they handled the case, that didn’t engender warm feelings,” Richard Levy, a lawyer for the Vulcan Society and the class of black firefighters, said of the city. “When they get ruled against, they think that it’s bias. It’s a result of their own conduct, and it’s a result of the facts in the case.”

A version of this article appears in print on January 21, 2012, on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: City Criticizes Judge in Case Of Hiring At Fire Dept. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe